With a festival visit, a holiday and the start up costs for a new ‘hobby’ September was an expensive month. But some luck on the income front still got me a very nice savings rate.

Income: 3 091,47 euro

Expenses: 1 948,09 euro

Savings: 1 143,38 euro or 36,98%

Another month with an above 35% savings rate. Read below the ‘luck’ I had on the income front

Income:

Income was my standard wage of 2 217,47 euro. I took a three week holiday in September and I have to admit, even though holiday money is an incredible complex arrangement in Belgium that in my opinion is in desperate need of simplification, it is a nice feeling to barely work during a month and still get your normal pay in your bank account!

I was already pretty happy that my expenses would stay below my normal income of 2 217,47 euro for September. But my mom is somewhat of a clean up mode in her house. This clean up also entails selling of stuff. And apparently the selling of stuff then implies I get the proceeds of this stuff (my mothers logic being I would have inherited the stuff upon her dead). So in September muy mother gave me an enveloppe with 874 euro cash. My parents are well aware of my investments and thus know I do not need the money. But they are perfectely happy with their life as it is and do not need it either. I just view it as a reduction of future inheritance taxes.

Expenses

With the execption of February when I bought the rowing machine September has been my most expensive month. Below is an overview of where I spend my money on.

1 100 euro was transferred to our joint account for mortgage, utilities, grocery shopping …

September was the start of me getting serious about my eating. So I had 2 visits with my dietician of 50 euro, blood work cost me 8 euro and the Dexa scan I reffered to in my health report was also 50 euro. So that is a total of 158 euro spend on my health. Future visits to the dietician will only be 25 euro so this cost will be lower in the future. Dieticians aren’t that expensive for the time and work they put into it. And I should be getting money back from my health insurance.

Me getting serious with my food did however not prevent me spending an extra 29 euro on food. Most of it wasn’t that ‘bad’ food. But it does prove I need to put more effort in meal prepping.

My bank now also charges me 1,33 euro a month for the privilige of having an account where I have to do everything online but as long as our mortgage is there I am unfortunately stuck at that bank.

My cell phone subscription was 10,86 euro this month and I did have to fill up the tank of my Vespa: 9,50 euro. Rising fuel prices do have a limited impact if your tank can only hold 5 liters.

In the fun category was our attendance at a festival in the Netherlands which cost me 70 euro in total.

And our stay at Ieper cost me 255 euro. Ieper is a nice and charming little town. It is was also a good reminder how all of our lives have improved beyond any imagination compared to how it was a hundred years ago.

At the end of my three week holiday I also took the train (17,20 euro) to Ghent to see some friends (10,40 euro spend at a bar).

During my holiday I als ordered a raspberry pie 4 and a 1 Terabite SSD card. Although I consider myself a tech guy I have never been a cryptocoin person (to this day I am still not a big fan of digital money, I prefer my money to be unprogrammable). But for some strange reason I am interested in the lightening Network

This layer on top of bitcoin makes cheap and fast transactions possible. And more important: all you need is a raspberry pie and decent SSD storage to run your own lightning node. Which then allows you to manage your own channels on the lightning network. In a way it is like the Swift network for international payments but ran by a couple of weird guys who put a raspberry pie in their cupboard. Add to this that managing these channels and the necessary liquidity on your channel is part math part art and well, I am very interested. It is in theory possible to actualy make some money by providing this service but I am just in it for the weirdness of it all and consider it a hobby.

In Octobre I will purchase some additional satoschi’s as to have the necessary funding to set up my very first channel since the necessary hardware did cost me 259 euro. But there is a lot of fun stuff you can do with a raspberry pie so the hardware will be put to use in one way or another.